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CENTER FOR ORAL AND PUBLIC HISTORY CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON and TUCKER WILDLIFE SANCTUARY NARRATOR: PAT ANTRIM INTERVIEWER: Volker Janssen DATE: June 7, 2008 LOCATION: Silverado Canyon, CA PROJECT: 2007 SANTIAGO FIRE VJ: It is June 7th, 2008, and we are at Pat Antrim's house in Silverado Canyon to talk with him about the Santiago wildfire of October 2007 for the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary. My name is Volker Janssen. I'm assistant professor at Cal State Fullerton. Pat, maybe we'll start talking first a little about your life prior to the canyon and maybe prior to your firefighting experiences. Where and when were you born? PA: I was born in Newport Beach, but my life pretty much has been Silverado. My parents moved here when I was a year old, so I've been here for forty-seven of my forty-eight years. VJ: So, you've lived here pretty much all your life. PA: All but one year, yeah. VJ: Wow. And what kind of childhood was that? PA: It was great. It was kind of the Andy Mayberry1 type of childhood. In the sixties and seventies it was an even more small town than it is now, more remote because development hadn't creeped out this far yet. It was the type of place that they stocked the creek up behind the forest service gate, and every Thursday we all went up there with our fishing poles after school. The type of place where you couldn't get—well, you could get into trouble, but everybody knew who you were, where you should be, where you shouldn't be, and if you're in the wrong place, typically somebody would pick you up, take you home, and make sure your parents knew where you were. It really was a neat—a different experience than today's kids. Anywhere you want to go hike, there's plenty of hiking, there's creeks to play in, there's fishing to do, there's 1 Reference to ―The Andy Griffith Show,‖ an American sitcom televised by CBS from 10/3/1960 to 4/1/1968. Widower Sheriff Andy and his son Opie live with Andy’s Aunt Bee in Mayberry NC, a town with virtually no crimes to solve. 1 ANTRIM OH 4138 bike riding, there's motorcycle riding, there's—it's kind of a unique small town in mega-Orange County growing up. VJ: What about your parents? What did your father do that you could live out here? PA: My father was a title escrow officer in Laguna Beach, so the commute from here to Laguna wasn't too far. And for a number of years, my mom was a stay-at-home mom until she got her real estate license, then she was a local real estate agent up here in the canyons. Obviously, just real local, so— VJ: Were they nature people? PA: No, they weren't. We moved out here primarily—when I was born I had underdeveloped lungs, and the doctors at Hoag Hospital said the moist climate wasn't going to be good for me, and they said either move to a higher altitude climate or move to the desert. And, fortunately, my parents didn't care for the desert very much, and they found this. It was close to where everything else that they did was, and it was high enough that it gave me a little bit drier climate instead of the moist sea air every day. And that's how they found it. VJ: And did that help your lungs? PA: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I haven't had any problems. I had childhood asthma as a kid, but no deficits or anything restricting me from anything, and— VJ: Well, it sounds like you had a real fun childhood. I mean, you were outdoors a lot, doing a lot of different things. PA: Mm-hmm. We were. At summertime we typically spent our entire summers outside. A couple of good friends of mine, we'd camp at each other's houses every—a week at our house, a week at his house. Sleeping bags out in the backyards instead of staying indoors. Of course, after we supposedly would go to bed, we'd go out and terrorize the neighbors, water balloon people's houses and knock on people's doors. You know, the ding-dong-ditch type of stuff. Typical kids stuff, but—In this canyon, we didn't have television until 1972. Cable TV wasn't a thing then and antenna reception didn't work. Computers weren't too prevalent yet. So, you had radio and you had your own entertainment, so you went and played, and you were creative, and you found things to do, instead of—you know, everything's right at your fingertips today. VJ: And you probably really got to know the natural environment here pretty well, right? PA: Yeah. As a kid you knew all the little nooks and crannies, you knew all the little side canyons, you knew the wildlife that was here. You couldn't necessarily name everything, but you kind of knew a lot about what this was. VJ: Any dangerous encounters with snakes or— 2 ANTRIM OH 4138 PA: No. Maybe rattlesnakes every so often, but nothing that you'd say, Oh, my gosh! Just normal day-to-day snake in the yard, and take care of it or move it or whatever. I've seen mountain lions, and we had a bobcat in our yard here a few days ago that walked by, but nothing of any consequence of fright, if you will. Just pretty basic— coyotes are around. But we're in their area, so we kind of expect to see those things. VJ: Where did you go to school? That probably wasn't that close then. PA: Elementary school, I went to Silverado School out on Santiago Canyon Road, and then junior high and high school I went down in Orange. Santiago Junior High School and El Modena High School were my high schools. And we were bussed from here down to school and back. VJ: Were you sort of the exotic kids from the canyons in Orange then? PA: We were definitely canyon kids. We were recognized as being—I don't want to say different, but different. We were the canyon kids. VJ: How many of you were there on the bus? PA: It was full. It was a full bus. I don't know the exact numbers, but there was--it was a bus that transported the elementary kids to that school and then a separate bus that did the junior high and high school. But it was—I don't know, a school bus is about forty people? Whatever it holds. It was full, for both the junior high and the high school. VJ: There were a lot of kids in the canyon then? PA: Oh, yeah. And there still is. There's still a lot of kids that grew up here. VJ: Did you ever find a temptation to live somewhere out there? Going to school there you saw other kids growing up differently in a suburb. Orange was then a town that was growing pretty fast, right? PA: Yeah, it was. No. I've never had a desire to leave here. Obviously, I have a choice now, and I don't have a desire to go someplace that is so, um, like each other. I mean, even in some of the old areas of Orange there's still—you have your one square little block, or one little cubicle of area you have. Here, you've got a whole—even though we have lots, I couldn't tell you how far up that hillside my lot line goes. To me, that hillside, all the way back in the forest, is mine. That's what I stare at every day. So my yard kind of goes on as far as my eyesight can see. The atmosphere here is still the type of place that the neighbors know where your key is for your house, if you even lock your door. They take care of the place if you're gone, or if they see something amiss they go, Hmm, that's not right, and they'll go and actually figure out what's going on, instead of many places that just don't do that. You barely know who your next door neighbor is in a lot of communities. And here, that's never the case. Here, you pretty much still know everybody. You know what 3 ANTRIM OH 4138 everybody does, you know what their schedules are, you know when something's not right and you get involved, and you care about your neighbors. VJ: Is there anything you feel you might be missing that communities in the suburbs or in more urban areas have that you don't have, or you feel that's probably some—a disadvantage you find living with, but nonetheless that would be a disadvantage? PA: Convenience. Things here is a drive to anywhere. So the convenience. Down in Orange or in any other populated area, the store's right around the corner. Home Depot's right around the corner. Here, it's a planned event. If you're going to go do errands, you're going to spend a few hours running into town to do all your errands so you're not making five or six trips. It's a fifteen, twenty minute drive either way.

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